Author: Anne-Flore Elard, Jan 11 2021
For who wonders why this website is named the golden mean, here is a short nerd story.
Aristotle’s theory of ethics (Eudemian Ethics) states that ethics is not in someone’s actions but in someone’s character. The good news is that ethics can be improved through self-awareness or self-reflection. The Golden Mean is a golden ethical standard where one aspires to be equidistant from extremes (excess/deficiency). Moral good is the balance between two vices, e.g. as far from anger as from indifference. A life program in all things.
The Golden Mean is also used sometimes to designate the golden ratio. The golden ratio is interestingly closer to Plato’s perspective that the good is a mixture of beauty, proportion and truth, and “goodness is what makes the mixture good in itself” (Philebus).
The golden ratio is an irrational number, with the fascinating property that it can be defined in terms of itself: 1.61803(…) = 1 + 1/1.61803(…) – try it – and can go on forever: 1 + 1/1.61803+1/1.61803+ … . Now for the beauty and proportion side, if you draw a line and split it in two parts of unequal lengths, you will find the golden ratio when the longer part divided by shorter part is equal to the whole divided by the longer part. That will be about 1.618 (always for that case). Many find that beautiful architecture, especially classical, reflects this proportion of lines (also called golden section, divine proportion)
Kepler (an astronomer) in turn showed that if you divide a Fibonacci number by the one right before it in the sequence, you will find the same golden ratio. What a teaser, that set me in for the search of the good.